May 16, 2005

For some reason, driving from Cleveland to Ithaca today, I felt like listening to talk radio, and I just kept switching back and forth between America Right and Air America -- occasionally mixing in The Power.

America Right was, understandably, fixated on the Newsweek story, but there was very little about it on Air America. Disturbingly, the only attempt at humor I heard from Al Franken in the hour or so I spent with him today was a joke that Donald Rumsfeld had ordered that a Bible and a Talmud be flushed down the toilet, along with an Encyclopedia Britannica "for the reality-based" people.

Franken's show was nearly humor free -- entirely humor free if you don't count bad jokes. It was grim indeed. Some of the things he said were truly awful. Within the space of perhaps half an hour, he said that George Bush could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if he had "paid attention" -- it's in the 9/11 report! -- and that Iraq would be better off if Saddam were still in power -- not merely that on balance, the improvement of having him out is not worth the cost, but that the Iraqis were better off with Saddam.

Al Franken obviously didn't read the same 9/11 Commission report that I read.

While the commission found many breakdowns in US intelligence gathering and sharing in the agencies of government, it doesn't lay blame for any negligence on the Bush Administration. The commission was so forthright in what it wrote that I feel certain that had it intended to accuse the Bush Administration of willfully ignoring the threat of what unfolded on 9/11, it would have done just that.

Of course, Franken's apparent loss of humor is a tragedy for him and for everyone.

To that Liberal Elite above, name calling in order to prove a superior intellect is merely proof of the opposite. Futhermore, it is such a common tactic among you friends that the most common reaction to reading such innane statements is a quiet chuckle.

Jim C.: I thought he was funny as Stuart Smalley. I even liked the movie with that character. But he was making fun of liberals! I think he knows how to do that and has plenty of material, but he can't use it anymore.

I recently had a chance to listen to Air America while driving a friend's car. I gotta say, my intense dislike of Franken aside, I found the same lack of humor. In the few hours I listened to him, there was one attempt at a comedy bit called, "Oy, Oy." The premise is that Franken's partner reads news regarding Bush, the administration or the war, and he says "Oy, Oy" in a jewish(?) accent. That..was the whole bit. And both Franken and his partner (cannot remember her name) have this monotone quality to their voices. The show is dreary and lifeless, politics aside.